December 1, and it’s time to think about how to truly nail your content in 2016. I’m not touting a lose-weight-fast or get-rich-quick New Year resolution (those are usually broken by the next week). I’m talking about long term, dedicated strategy–and a vantage point that will get you winning content this upcoming New Year.
Right now, there are about 80 million millennials living in the US. That translates to about ¼ of the total population and since this group wields a buying power of about $200 billion dollars, they’re currently the single most lucrative market in all of advertising.
That said, you probably want to reach out to them with your content in 2016, right? They will be a bigger demographic than ever next year – they are the big, smart, and buying crowd YOU need to attract. Just how do you go about it?
We have some tips to help.
10 Tips to Effectively Market to Millennials with Your Content in 2016
1) Get authentic
Millennials spend about 25 hours each week online and they want authentic content. Buttoned-up ‘50s style marketing tactics don’t work on this crowd and they’re scouring blogs, social media, and websites for content they can truly connect with.
In fact, 43% of millennials rank authenticity as more important than content when they consume news and, as a result, they’re on the search for content that mimics their feelings, opinions, and passions while also offering unique value and a distinct voice.
Take Taco Bell, for example, which recently began a program to reach out to millennials with its “Millennial Word of the Week” program. This program makes the brand appealing, approachable, interesting, and relatable. Plus, since the whole program is curated by Taco Bell employees the same age as millennials, it’s authentic, which is what millennials have been looking for this whole time.
2) Focus on inbound
Have you ever been curious how many millennials will gladly navigate away from your page due to an unwelcome or intrusive ad? The grand majority of them, that’s how many. In fact, according to Wired, millennials alone have killed off several outbound marketing tactics that are inauthentic, invasive, or not valuable. What’s more, 84% of millennials just plain don’t trust traditional advertising, which creates a sticky situation for advertisers.
This is true because millennials know what they want, they’re tech-savvy enough to find it online, and they’re not willing to suffer websites that make them sit through unwanted or intrusive ads. When millennials spend time online, they’re doing research via social media, blogs, websites, and YouTube, which means that inbound marketing tactics are the best and the only way to reach them. By focusing harder than ever before on creating and distributing high-quality, relevant content that actually meets the needs of millennials and helps to answer their questions, you can ensure that your site doesn’t earn a swift “back” click.
3) Strive to be informative
Possibly more so than any generation before them, millennials are hungry for information, and this means that they’ll support businesses that are dedicated to offering informative content. Millennials are drawn to eBooks, videos, tutorials, blog posts, how-to’s, and customer reviews more than they are product listings, and this means that if you can create content in 2016 that offers an expert’s perspective on an everyday challenge, millennials are going to bite.
This is because millennials are 247% more likely than their older counterparts to be influenced in sales decisions by blogs and social media. With that in mind, consider offering tutorials and videos for your millennial customer base. Keep in mind that considering their tech-savvy nature and their propensity for sharing, they’re much more likely to share your video than they are to pull your flier off of a bulletin board and pass it around to their friends.
4) Focus on tailor-made
Millennials are plentiful, powerful, wealthy, and what else – oh yeah! They’re smart too. This means that millennials have a stronger-than-usual B.S. detector and they’ll be onto you in an instant if you create content in 2016 that’s meant solely to get into their pocketbooks.
Instead, focus on creating educational content that caters to their interests. One great way to do this is to focus on selling a lifestyle rather than a product. This means that you should be showcasing the ways in which your product, good, or service can help enhance their lives, produce unforgettable experiences, and equip them with great stories. Trust us, these things are far more valuable to millennials than product descriptions on some stagnant web page.
5) Get collaborative
42% of millennials want to help companies develop products and services and that’s why it pays to use them as a resource when creating products for consumption. Consider, as an example, Lays’ “Do us a Flavor” campaign in which they encourage consumers to come up with the next potato chip flavor to be marketed in stores.
Campaigns like this make millennials the co-creators of a company and increase the likelihood that they’ll buy your product once it hits the market. It also engages their sense of self-expression and personal branding, helping to fuel the values of individuality and uniqueness in marketing, sales, and beyond.
6) Consider the difference between usage and ownership
According to HubSpot, millennials prefer to use things rather than own them. Rather than owning housefuls of things they only seldom need, millennials would rather pay full price to rent items when they need them. Consider examples of this like Uber, Airbnb, Spotify, and Rent the Runway, a popular rental clothing site. To apply this to your content, consider creating forms of content like classes, webinars, and eBooks that millennials can rent rather than buy.
7) Offer a full-spectrum experience
Unlike their Baby Boomer parents, millennials may actually enjoy the act of shopping more than actually purchasing items. This explains the popularity of sites like Pinterest and Etsy and provides a definite edge for any content creator that can master the art of providing a web-based exploration experience for audiences. To apply this to your content, link content with social sharing sites like Pinterest and ensure that everything you create is designed to effectively inspire and engage your millennial audience into activity.
8) Optimize for mobile
Millennials live on their mobile devices and if you’re not optimizing your content to accommodate that, you’re going to miss out on a great deal of business. In 2015, active social media accounts saw a 23% increase, which equates the creation of over 300 million accounts.
This means that all of your content, social, and other sharing should be optimized for mobile. To do this, pay attention to in-stream photo requirements for sites like Twitter and ensure that you’re embracing content forms like vertical video (very few mobile users ever rotate their phones to watch videos). This holds true for everything except for YouTube, in which case horizontal videos are still king.
9) Get on the video train
In 2014, Facebook began slogging into the world of video content and sharing and, by 2015, Mark Zuckerberg announced that more than 3 billion videos are shared and viewed daily on Facebook newsfeeds around the world.
The reason for this is that 67% of millennials believe that videos produce more relatable content than TV. What’s more, 63% of millennials report that they would try a brand or item recommended by a YouTube personality quicker than they would one recommended by a television personality. While this trend may seem startling, it’s a clear call to marketers everywhere to start producing more video content. With platforms like Snapchat, Meerkat, and Periscope on the rise, it’s obvious that video content is truly the content of the future.
10) Be fluid
Millennials are the most tech-savvy generation in history and they’re also the most innovative. While they play a large part in consuming the content of today, they’re also behind the scenes, developing new tech, producing new apps, and altogether changing the world as we know it.
While the previous 9 tips hold true for today and the foreseeable future, it’s important for marketers to continue to be fluid and adaptable with their content. This means not getting stuck in boxes or being afraid to try new things. As millennials continue to change the world, content will need to change to keep up with them and the marketers that can accommodate this are the ones that will succeed.
Conclusion
It’s an exciting time to be a marketer and as we draw closer to 2016 one thing is sure: millennials have and will continue to inform the direction of content far and wide. This is a great thing, though, as it drives innovation and positive change, and the marketers who can embrace it and continue to reach out to millennials through their content are the ones who will experience content marketing success as they continue to publish even better content in 2016.
This is an original short by Julia McCoy, CEO of Express Writers.
Everyone around me, everywhere I look, is having some sort of “Blowout Black Friday Clearance Deal NOW!” I flipped through (and instantly deleted) maybe 50 emails with some version of this title just today.
Now I’m not one to stop anyone from going to sales or having them. If that’s in your best interests, by all means—enjoy Black Friday.
Why We Didn’t Have A Blowout Black Friday Sale
How come we were one of the very few businesses who didn’t send out one of these emails or put out a quick promo code on social media?
For the new people perusing this. Express Writers is a copywriting agency. Our job is to write and create high quality content, web pages, ongoing blogs, sales pages, resumes, you-name-it—for businesses of all sizes and types.
My point is we don’t sell a product. We sell services. Human services.
And creative services, at that. No machine can replace a pen wielded by a real human with an active brain that has been endowed with the extra cells of writing creativity. We don’t sell a product we can mass-produce at once, sit in the closet, and ship out at a moment’s notice. Or what can be discounted for a quick sale at the end of the year.
Human services shouldn’t be discounted just because the commercial, product-oriented world has declared the Friday after Thanksgiving THE day for “blowout sales”.
4 Reasons Writing Doesn’t Ever Deserve a Coupon Code
1. It’s humanly created. Did I say yet that writing is a service written specifically to order, EVERY time it’s ordered? That is, if you want high quality. There’s services like Constant Content where writers bucket articles with random keywords, and you can come and buy those. I don’t recommend this, because in 2015/2016, to stand out in a huge sea of content marketing, you need to be unique; have your own voice; research and put a lot of work in; and have your own expertise angle to become a thought leader (a factor of winning content online).
2. It always takes time. Writers are working on the clock. If they give you a discount, chances are they have to rush through that piece and not spend as much time so they can make a decent hourly rate. And that’s why we don’t ever allow bartering. We know how much time is required by not just the writer, but our management; content specialists; and editorial staff on every single content piece (we never skip the quality process on anything). So, we charge to make the process worth our time, each time.
3. It’s too valuable. Would you ask your heart surgeon for a discount? Would you ask your chiropractor? Replace that with any service you value. Writing isn’t necessarily heart surgery, but it’s a talent to be valued. This ties into our human creation process mentioned. It also has huge ROI if you pick the right creative writer. Just don’t think of asking a good copywriter for a discount on their talents. The value is too high.
4. Writing is an art. A fading art, a God-given talent that not everyone can boast of. I meet a lot of people who say they can write or edit, but once they’re given our SEO and content tests, cannot. To truly create high quality content for the web is actually getting harder to do, because it’s hard to find a good copywriter who is dedicated and given to their trade.
So, don’t do a quick sale if you’re among those offering a human deliverable. Something that requires brain cells to come up with and deliver to specific order details, not in mass amounts that will sit on shelves for unlimited dates.
Here’s to the rebels of Black Friday.
Those who don’t conform and discount themselves to match the commercialization of America.
If you’re humanly creating what you’re selling for a living, don’t cheapen yourself for 24 hours just to match a short-lived fad.
I leave you with this quote by Eric Thomas:
To get high quality, non-cheap quality writing services 365 days of the year, visit our Content Shop.
Happy Thanksgiving from all of us at Express Writers!
This Thanksgiving season, we hope you’re enjoying some well-earned time off!
That being said, in our industry, we don’t really see it as time off from content creation. That’s because Thanksgiving is a great time to create some seriously fun content. The festiveness of the season and the air of celebration in the air mean that Thanksgiving is a wonderful time to create and distribute content your readers will love.
Just how do you go about this?
5 Thanksgiving Content Tips Readers Will Love
Don’t be a turkey, make holiday content work for you this Thanksgiving Day! Here are five of our top holiday content tips for creating memorable Thanksgiving-themed content.
1. Snap and Share Photos of Your Holiday Celebration
40% of people respond better to visual content than they do text, so don’t hesitate to take some photos this holiday season. Don’t be shy to share your personal festivities!
A photo posted by Condé Nast Traveler (@cntraveler) on
Snap pictures of your movements throughout the Thanksgiving holiday, whether you volunteer, spend time with family and friends, eat a turkey or a ham, or spend it away from the snow in someplace tropical.
Consider dedicating a blog entirely to photos and then encourage your readers to submit their own photos in the comments. Visual content is a big deal right now and creating some of your own can help people connect to your content and feel the Thanksgiving cheer!
2. Share Traditions
You look forward to it every Thanksgiving: Grandma’s creamy, gooey, delicious pumpkin pie – the recipe for which she got from her grandmother. Why not share the love this Thanksgiving and share the recipe with your fans?
Doing this provides value on a few different levels: first of all, you’re giving your readers something actionable that they can apply to their lives and, secondly, you’re giving them pie and who doesn’t love pie?
If you don’t have a coveted family recipe to share with your readers, consider telling them about the traditions you do have over the holidays and then encourage them to share their traditions as well. This engages readers in your content and helps them feel seen, respected, and cared for by your brand.
3. Give Back
Do you have something that can benefit someone else? Why not use the Thanksgiving holiday as an opportunity to give it away? Whether you run a class that can help fans learn something new or you sell a product that can enhance people’s lives, Thanksgiving is the ideal time to run a promotion that allows your customers to enter for a chance to win.
Holiday promotions give people something to get excited about and, in advance of the Christmas holiday, promotions may even help your customers get that special someone a gift they’ve always wanted.
No matter how you choose to structure your promotion, Thanksgiving is shouldered by two of the biggest shopping days of the year (Black Friday and Cyber Monday) so this is a great time to give some gifts and share the joy!
4. Share What You’re Thankful About
What is Thanksgiving all about, after all? One of the best ways to create great content this Thanksgiving is simply to be thankful! Be thankful for your readers and your business partners and all of the people who have helped you get where you are today and then tell them so.
Consider sending your readers a heartfelt “thank-you” email or offering small incentives as a showing of your gratitude. No matter what you choose to do, Thanksgiving is a fantastic time to let the people near you know exactly how much you appreciate them.
5. Try New Things
If you’ve never done a podcast before but Crazy Aunt Lisa is coming to Thanksgiving dinner and she’s got some serious stories, right now might be a great time to dip your foot into a new content form.
Whether you’ve been meaning to move from short-form to long-form or textual to visual, the Thanksgiving holiday is a great time to take advantage of the abundance of your surroundings to step into uncharted content waters.
In addition to keeping you on your creative toes, this can also help you keep your site fresh and keep readers interested.
Take These Content Tips and Go Forth!
There you have it – our top 5 content tips for creating great marketing this Thanksgiving season. While we hope that your Thanksgiving holiday inspires you to crank out some exciting new content, we also hope that your Thanksgiving holiday is filled with all the things that are really important: friends, family, and happiness for one and for all!
Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours from the Express Writers team.
Anyone who has ever studied English or writing knows just how hilarious people think they’re being when they ask “What in the world are you ever going to do with that?”
It’s long been considered a source of fun and frivolity to pick on writers for their delicate sensibilities and their seemingly useless talents and training…until now.
Right now, you and I are living in the era of the copywriter as the online content writer, or SEO copywriter… and it’s arguable that there are few other skills that are in such high demand right now.
That’s right: high demand.
Copywriting is a broad profession that embodies many things and, now more than ever, people need copywriters to make their online businesses go around, to help their pages show up in search results, to execute good SEO, and to master the written word in order to provide value and excitement for readers.
The Evolution of the Copywriter To The Online Content Writer
The role of the copywriter as it is today, with many jobs in online content writing specifically, has metamorphosed hugely since the inception of advertising.
Back in the ‘30s and ‘40s, copywriters were charged with developing ad copy people would love, which typically meant it was full of puns, over-explaining, and outrageous exaggerations (like the 1937 Camel Cigarette ad whose headline was “for digestion’s sake – smoke Camels!”).
In the ‘60s and ‘70s, the job of copywriting began to change when Bill Bernbach, the first man to put copywriters and art directors together on projects, created a new-age copy creation team that was dedicated to producing ads that were more honest, stark, and open. Throughout the ‘80s and the ‘90s, copywriting continued to change: long copy dominated advertising and visuals became more important but in the year 2000, it all began to change.
Suddenly, visual gags were all the rage and body copy all but died altogether. Throughout the next several years, copywriting became a spammy profession that was focused on cramming as many keywords into a piece of content as possible or building sneaky, unethical links. Thanks to the pressures of the market and the overwhelming trend of copy in general, copywriting became an environment in which crappy content was king and black hats were in vogue.
Today, however, copywriting is a high-brow practice that requires extensive knowledge of SEO, marketing, and a wide variety of writing tactics that can help businesses put their best face forward.
The Changing Tides of Copywriting: Google, Value, and Other Factors
The reason for the evolution of online content writing that has taken place over the last decade has to do in large part with Google. Over the years, Google has released a series of updates aimed at targeting so-called “black-hat SEO” practices, such as keyword stuffing, doorway pages, invisible text, or page swapping, and rewarding sites that feature high-quality, original, valuable content.
These changes have made it nearly impossible for crappy sites to scrape by and, as such, the algorithm updates have created a brand new demand for talented, knowledgeable copywriters that know how to produce great site rankings through skill and technique rather than spammy, dark-side practices. As Google’s algorithm updates have only continued to press forward, this need has become more and more pronounced and, nowadays, it’s impossible for a site to rank or survive without a team of talented copywriters and other marketing professionals on staff.
4 Important Things Copywriters Need to Know
Despite its great demand right now, very few people know what copywriters actually do. We’re confused with journalists and, when the profession comes up at a dinner party, are often regarded with raised eyebrows and a deer-in-the-headlights sort of “Ohhhh” from the person who mistakenly asked what it is that we do. Nobody knows what copywriters do and that’s because we operate largely behind the scenes.
Despite this reality, copywriters play a large part in making the digital world go around and there are dozens of things copywriters need to know in order to do their jobs well. Here are just a few:
1. How to Write Electrifying Headlines
What makes you decide to read an article as you scroll through your Facebook feed? If you’re like most social media users, it’s the headline or the featured image or some combination of both. Little did you know that copywriters have a hand in both of those things, but specifically the headline. One of the most important jobs a copywriter has is to create magnetic headlines that draw audiences in and make them want to click on an article. This requires a little bit of a magic, a little bit of technical skill, and a whole lot of technique.
2. How to Use SEO Components in Writing
Copywriters are asked to create great content that wants to go viral and, aside from writing clearly and providing value to readers, there’s only one way to do this: SEO. SEO stands for “search engine optimization” and is the practice by which writers make content easy to read for both people and search engines. SEO entails everything from keyword usage to meta titles and descriptions and is an important part of making sure you can find exactly what you’re looking for online. Additionally, good SEO helps sites get their content out there in front of consumers and makes sure that google users can always find what they’re looking for when they enter a search queries in the search box.
3. How to Provide Value to Readers
People use search engines to ask and answer questions and one of the most important jobs of a copywriter is to ensure that the content that pops up in response to search queries is valuable, useful, and helpful. This means that copywriters must be able to anticipate reader questions and answer them from an empathetic and informative standpoint. They must also be able to cite sources, provide trustworthy research, include visuals for reference, and do everything in their power to ensure that the reader’s questions are answered and that he or she genuinely enjoys the content that presents itself.
4. How to use multi-media content to grab reader interest
Today, content is king but content is also a broad, broad term. Content entails everything, including but not limited to blog posts, articles, eBooks, white papers, social media posts, podcasts, Tweets, videos, images, memes, infographics, and video casts. In order to be effective in today’s content creation climate, copywriters need to know how to use all of these things and use them well. That means that it’s no longer enough for a copywriter to be good with a pen and paper – they also need to be part graphic designer, part marketer, part SEO, part visual artist, part documentary filmmaker and part research analyst in order to pull all these things together into one cohesive package. What’s more, copywriters need to know how to work with dozens of different blogging, content and image creation, and social media platforms in order to distribute content to a wide variety of readers effectively. How’s that for a laundry list of qualifications?
5. How to Write Well!
Last but not least, copywriters need to know how to write well! Nobody wants to slog through textbook-ish jargon online and that sort of junk only drives people away. Similarly, nobody wants to struggle through typo-heavy crap written by someone in a hurry. As businesses get busier and busier with all the aspects of marketing, promotion, and product development that they deal with on a daily basis, copywriters become more and more in demand. Content creation is a serious responsibility and a time-consuming obligation and often, there isn’t anyone on a business team who knows how to (or has the time to) do it well. This is one of the main reasons that copywriters are in such high demand right now – because they write clear, concise content that readers can understand, interact with, and enjoy. Tell that to all those people who made fun of you for being a writer.
Conclusion
Right now, copywriters are the magicians behind a significant portion of the web and, as web-based marketing continues to boom in the coming years, talented copywriters will only continue to become more and more popular. Whether we’re working on articles, eBooks, blogs or white papers, there is a huge amount of opportunity for copywriters right. We work in marketing, tech companies, brick-and-mortar businesses, and e-commerce settings.
Copywriting is hot right now and there is truly no shortage of places to use that wonderful talent of yours – writing!
We’re hiring at Express Writers! Apply as a writer or editor.
You’ve just written a book, how exciting! Now that you’ve finished it, you’re probably wondering how exactly to go about promoting it.
You’ve heard about press releases, but are they a thing of the past?
Great news, they aren’t! Since the SEO landscape has changed, quality is the name of the game for worthwhile press releases. You should have a solid journalist expert writing it, and a top notch news network. As long as you’re not distributing a PR for links only, you’re going to get a lot out of it.
Press releases are perfect for books whether they are paper copies or in ebook format, and they are perfect for spreading the word about your new release. Let’s talk more.
How to Write a Press Release for a Book: The Basics
Here’s a brief overview of how to write a press release for a book.
1. Always Use Captivating Headlines
Press releases are similar to other content in that it needs a captivating headline. Without a great headline, people are likely to pass your press release off as a boring, typical PR with nothing interesting. Most press releases aren’t boring, especially yours, but if the headline is boring everyone will assume the PR is, as well.
2. This Is A Chance to Provide Information
Press releases do help you promote you and your book, but you shouldn’t make it super promotional. Leave that to your promotional campaigns. Instead, make sure your press release provides people with information regarding you, your book, why you wrote it, and what you hope readers gain from it. This will help people know if it is something they will be interested in reading or not. We are all so busy with different life things that we need to know if a book is worthwhile to read. When writing your press release, make sure to write it in the third person because it is much more professional for readers and it helps you provide all necessary information that first or second person writing may forget.
3. Make Sure It Goes To The Right Places
Before sending out your press release, make sure you are sending it to the right places. First, you should publish it online. This is the new wave of the press release, making it more available for people to read and learn about your book or company. You can post a link to it on any social site, giving people directions on where to look. Second, you need to consider sending your press release to your local bookstore, local magazines and papers, and other companies that will benefit from your book. Research these particular companies and make sure you know the different places that would like to sell your book. You may even consider sending your press release to your local library. When you send out your press release, consider sending your book or at least a snippet from your book to make the local entities feel secure with publishing your press release.
4. Press Releases Can Be Optimized For Google
The neat thing about the new press release is that you can optimize it for Google by utilizing keywords. You can put the keywords throughout your press release and in your headline to gain Google’s eye, but always remember to follow SEO (search engine optimization) rules when writing anything for the web. Google is known for slapping bans on anyone participating in negative SEO. A great way to avoid falling into this common pitfall is to use your keywords sparingly. If you stuff your press release, or any content, with keywords, Google will ban your site, as well as keep people from reading, and will just look sloppy overall.
5. Make it Fun, Make It Shareable
You can still make writing a press release fun while still having enough information available in the PR. One of the best ways to craft content these days is to add sub-headers throughout to give people the ability to skim over your writing. This works perfectly for PRs and you can also add funny little quips or one-liners. This makes people decide you are a fun author and they would love to give your book a shot. You can even put in a few quotes regarding your book, but only quotes that are important. Just don’t fill your PR with tons of quotes and sayings.
6. Aim For Top Quality
The chances of your press release being read before going in a newspaper is pretty slim. Usually, editors will get a press release and do a quick glance over it before putting it in the next paper or magazine release. This makes it crucial for your PR to be full of quality information. Avoid typos and grammatical errors, fact check yourself constantly, and make it sound incredibly professional. This will be perfect if a publisher reads it or if an interested party gets ahold of the paper. You want to impress them as soon as they read that press release.
Now That You Know How to Write a Press Release for a Book…
Press releases are crucial to publishing anything whether it is an app, a change in your company, event, or book. These give people necessary information about your product while piquing their interest in your item. This is particularly handy for books, and you will find more people asking to purchase a copy once you have published an incredibly crafted press release!
Need a great team that writes and distributes, with a 100% success rate? Order today with us!
